TheXTech and X2: opportunities for improvement

[ds-sloth]

This morning I read an interesting but over-enthusiastic topic about TheXTech and X2. Even though it was a bit biased, I have to say that it made me happy that our work is being appreciated. I'd like to share some of my goals for TheXTech and get some feedback from the community about how it and X2 can help each other grow.

Goals of TheXTech

TheXTech is a source port and continuation of SMBX 1.3. It aims to be the best way to play SMBX 1.3 episodes. At the heart of TheXTech is the goal of allowing the player to customize gameplay to their liking while still maintaining a high degree of polish.

I like to say that X2 is designed to put power in the hands of the content creator and TheXTech is designed to put power in the hands of the player (and I don't see this as a pro or con of either -- just a difference).

It's not clear to me to what extent TheXTech should become its own content standard apart from SMBX 1.3 and X2. I don't want to contribute to fragmentation, but I'd also love to get some new episodes that can be played on all the devices TheXTech supports.

Features of TheXTech

In case you aren't familiar with TheXTech, I'll quickly share some of the big features that have made it into the various TheXTech releases (or that are currently in our dev builds):

• Console ports: TheXTech supports all sorts of consoles from DSi to Switch. I could write a whole post on the technical work I did to reduce the game's CPU and RAM consumption, but that's not the focus of this thread.
• Autocode support: it's possible to play many Autocode episodes like A2XT1: Analogue Funk or Superb Demo Sisters in TheXTech.
• Bitmask rendering: transparent GIF graphics are drawn exactly the same way you remember them in SMBX 1.3 -- a bit strange, but full of character. For X2-style alpha blending you can convert your transparent graphics to PNG.
• Audiovisual polish: I wouldn't normally have put this on a list of our features, but it was mentioned in the above topic. TheXTech has some nice screen fade transitions and audio effects.
• UI and episode translation: the interface can be displayed in a number of languages. If an episode creator wants to, they can also add translations of the entire episode to multiple languages.
• 4P split/shared screen: up to four players can join in coop or battle mode. The player can choose to play in shared or split screen, and (for big 4K TVs) can even get a full 1280x720 window for each of the four players.
• Dynamic resolution: the player can choose whatever resolution they want to play in. Under the hood the game keeps track of an 800x600 camera and uses it for critical Event-related logic.
• Modern menus: there is an updated character select designed by Savby and an options menu that allows the game to be fully configured on consoles.
• Single-file episodes (dev feature): TheXTech can load compressed episodes from a high-performance archive indexed format based on the ISO and LZ4 standards. This allows episodes to be copied to phones or consoles as a single file, without a slow extraction process.

Features of X2

I'm not nearly as familiar with X2 as many people in the community, but I want to note that a lot of the above features can also be achieved in X2 (eg, there are scripts for screen transition effects or for non-800x600 resolutions).

Needless to say, X2 also has *much* more flexible scripting than TheXTech, and it has tons of episodes that leverage this scripting to do amazing and unexpected things.

Why this thread?

I'm interested to hear more from the community about how they're using TheXTech. Which features do you appreciate? Which don't you care much about? What do you think is missing?

There will be many more planning threads for X2 later, but I'm also curious to hear about opportunities for TheXTech and X2 to improve by exchanging ideas. Are there features of TheXTech that you miss when playing X2? Any X2 features you think belong in TheXTech?

[deice]

Are there features of TheXTech that you miss when playing X2? Any X2 features you think belong in TheXTech?

many of x2's high-value features are directly downstream from lunadll/lunalua, so saying xtech would benefit from a similar scripting system would definitely be a true statement, but reducing so much of what x2 supports, even in the base game, into a single "feature" is also unhelpful

i will say there are some xtech features (wldx files, compressed single-file episodes) that while not an absolute necessity, would be nice to have in x2, but also some features (such as native multiplatform support) that are fundamentally impossible, which leads into what i'm trying to say:

it is completely fine for such differences to exist, especially when they come with benefits on the side (smbx2's robust scripting system, xtech's fantastic optimization and cross-platform support)
if someone can run smbx2 on their pc, they can definitely run xtech on the same machine, so you have a "two cakes" situation where they can just play whatever they want in whichever engine supports it better. with myself as an example, the reason i don't use xtech very much is that i've been dabbling in lunalua for years now, so any time there's something i feel is missing i can just add it to the game myself. on the flip-side, someone can just as easily opt for xtech as their preferred engine if they don't care much for all the custom assets, or they don't wanna jump through hoops to use the software on linux, or for any number of reasons, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of that

i will also add that from what i've seen, xtech is impressively close to being a flawless substitute for having a raw 1.3 install, which i think is great and actually contributes to the opposite of fragmentation, but i might also be overestimating the progress made on it and am willing to be corrected in that regard

[Justin Bieber Fan]

TheXTech2 should become a thing then, or at least a way to play smbx2 episodes on TheXtech, I like these features on TheXTech like widescreen, smoothness, title screen, less bloaty, etc.
Please no ban it is just my opinion

[ihavenoname96]

TheXTech2 should become a thing then, or at least a way to play smbx2 episodes on TheXtech, I like these features on TheXTech like widescreen, smoothness, title screen, less bloaty, etc.
Please no ban it is just my opinion

nobody's going to ban you (not unless you do something that breaks the rules), even though its a really valid argument

[Emral]

I don't think a "TheXTech2" would work because the two engines, SMBX2 and TheXTech have pretty much directly opposed goals with their feature sets.
TheXTech focuses on globally available options for PLAYERS.
SMBX2 focuses on globally available options for CREATORS, and it's up to the creators to decide what options they want to pass on to players.

For example: If the creator of a SMBX2 episode wants to have screen size changes, they can add options for it, but it's not like SMBX2 is going to let you play widescreen in an episode that wasn't designed for widescreen.
The same goes for fade transitions and would apply to audio effects as well (though they are not in SMBX2 at the moment, even though an idea of "audio shaders" was floated by Rednaxela from time to time and is something I am looking forward to).

There's of course benefit to having some features from one in the other, but I think if an XTech feature was ported to X2, it'd have to be a designer-enabled option that is always disabled by default.
I haven't worked with TheXTech so I don't know how the pipeline of an X2 feature being ported to XTech would look, but as far as "making SMBX2 episodes playable in TheXTech" would go, I would expect there to be a lot of issues due to these levels and episode never having been designed with certain XTech features in mind, or implementing the same feature in a conflicting way.

[ds-sloth]

This is all helpful feedback!

I agree with Emral that TheXTech2 isn't really possible, and it's not really my goal to make TheXTech capable of playing X2 content. X2 itself is already ideal for that on computers, and the most popular non-computer target for TheXTech is handheld consoles that are too weak to support X2 episodes in any case.

Justin Bieber Fan, the features you mentioned (except for the title screen) are only possible because of the limitations of TheXTech (vs X2). Even if we add scripting to TheXTech (which some community members want), it'll be way more limited than X2's scripting.

Deice, I'm with you that convergence of the two engines isn't really desirable. My personal instinct is that (for the sake of long-term content preservation) we should eventually port X2 to C++ so we're not tied to Wintel, but even so I don't think X2 will ever run on something weaker than a Switch.

[deice]

My personal instinct is that (for the sake of long-term content preservation) we should eventually port X2 to C++

i can't say i know personally what the whole team's stance is on this, but i can say from my own knowledge of how x2 works under the hood that this would be an undertaking of insane proportions, even if a whole bunch of people got on board

the entire idea behind x2 is that it is built on top of 1.3 (literally hooking into a 1.3 executable with a known exact structure), and outside of anything programmed by level/episode creators, behaves just like 1.3 would (certain toggleable bugfixes notwithstanding), to the point that someone writing a script can be confident that accessing a specific offset within the process memory behaves in a consistent way across different versions of x2. as far as i can recall, xtech has some autocode features implemented in it via another layer of abstraction that translates memory addresses, and while rewriting the base game could probably allow this to exist in x2 without significant overhead, it'd be tantamount to dumping a large chunk of the lunadll backend out the window in favor of basically making the game from scratch again, which i feel is not really what x2 needs in the foreseeable future

also, this is pedantry, but lunadll is indeed written in c++, it just depends on certain windows libraries so it can do what it needs to in regards to the smbx process

[Rixitic]

The C++ stuff is most likely in reference to a port Sarn started, which iirc has its own abstraction/translation layer for memory addresses. Don't know the current progress on that, but my understanding is it's very much still a far future thing.

I should probably also mention that ds and I did discuss the prospect of single-file episodes on Discord, mainly because of how it would resolve certain recurring headaches I've been dealing with when updating episodes in the A2XT series. It's definitely something I'd like to see in a future beta/major release of X2 (as an alternative to open-folder episodes, of course, not replacing them completely.)

Also maybe moving save files and achievement progress into subfolders or just a separate directory in the X2 installation outright? Like, episode devs ideally should make use of source control and include those in their .gitignore equivalent file, but still.

I do have a decently sizable X2 feature wishlist beyond those, but since it's mostly X2-specific rather than overlap between X2 and TheXTech I'll save it for the future planning threads.

[ihavenoname96]

the only dream i want is that TheXTech gets some options to activate classic mode (not the one in the episode selection, just the abillity to restore the original 1up icon, and make it look like the SMBX 1.3)

[ds-sloth]

Retro / Hammermon: that's Vanilla mode, which disables TheXTech's features and bugfixes but is there for you if you want. You can enable it in Episode Settings or by pressing select on a new save in the main menu. If you want the game to look like 1.3 then you should also disable a lot of the new effects in Video Settings and set the resolution to 800x600 to get rid of the backdrop around the vanilla play field.